If you are a novice cloud developer looking for hands-on practice with GCP’s core infrastructure services, do yourself a favor and enroll in this quest. As a student, you will get practical experience by taking labs that dive into Cloud Storage, computing engines like Kubernetes, and key application services like Stackdriver and Deployment Manager. By taking this quest, you will develop invaluable skills that apply to any GCP project. 1-minute videos walk you through key concepts for each lab.

In this advanced-level quest, you will learn how you to harness serious GCP power and infrastructure. The hands-on labs will give you use cases, and you will be tasked with implementing scaling practices utilized by Google’s very own Solutions Architecture team. From developing enterprise grade load balancing and autoscaling, to building continuous delivery pipelines, Google Cloud Solutions I: Scaling your Infrastructure will teach you best practices for taking your GCP projects to the next level.

In this Quest, the experienced user of Google Cloud will learn how to describe and launch cloud resources with Terraform, an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. In these nine hands-on labs, you will work with example templates and understand how to launch a range of configurations, from simple servers, through full load-balanced applications.

If you want to take your GCP networking skills to the next level, look no further. This quest is composed of labs that cover real-life use cases and it will teach you best practices for overcoming common networking bottlenecks. From getting hands-on practice with testing and improving network performance, to integrating high-throughput VPNs and networking tiers, Network Performance and Optimization is an essential quest for GCP developers who are looking to double down on application speed and robustness.

In this introductory-level quest, you will get hands-on practice with the Google Cloud Platform’s fundamental tools and services. GCP Essentials is Qwiklabs’ most popular quest and for good reason—you will come in with little, or no prior cloud knowledge and come out with practical experience that you can apply to any GCP project. From writing Cloud Shell commands and deploying your first virtual machine, to running applications on Kubernetes Engine with load balancing, GCP Essentials is a prime introduction to the platform’s features. 1-minute videos walk you through key concepts for each lab.

If you’re looking to take your Google Cloud application to the next level, look no further than Deployment Manager. By automating the creation of GCP resources and services, Deployment Manager lets you focus on developing rather than maintaining. In this advanced-level quest, you will get hands on practice with Deployment Manager by building custom templates, automating Python and Jinja application instances, and scaling custom networks.

The Google Cloud Platform is committed to supporting Windows workloads in its frameworks and services. In this advanced-level quest, you will get hands you hands-on practice running many of the popular Windows services in GCP. For example, you will learn how to instantiate Microsoft SQL databases, cloud tools for Powershell, and Microsoft’s ASP.net (web app framework) on Google Cloud Platform frameworks.

This quest of "Challenge Labs" gives the student preparing for the Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect certification hands-on practice with common business/technology solutions using GCP architectures. Challenge Labs do not provide the "cookbook" steps, but require solutions to be built with minimal guidance, across many GCP technologies. All labs have activity tracking and in order to earn this badge you must score 100% in each lab. This quest is not easy and will put your GCP technology skills to the test. Be aware that while practice with these labs will increase your knowledge and abilities, we recommend additional study, experience, and background in cloud architecture to prepare for this certification.

In this fundamental-level quest, you will learn the ins and outs of Stackdriver: an important GCP service for generating insights into applications’ health. Stackdriver provides a wealth of information in application monitoring, report logging, and diagnoses. The labs in this quest will give you hands-on practice with Stackdriver, and will teach you how to monitor virtual machines, generate logs and alerts, and create custom metrics for application data.

In this introductory-level quest, you will learn the fundamentals of developing and deploying applications on the Google Cloud Platform. You will get hands-on experience with the Google App Engine framework by launching applications written in languages like Python, Ruby, and Java (just to name a few). You will see first-hand how straightforward and powerful GCP application frameworks are, and how easily they integrate with GCP database, data-loss prevention, and security services.